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You are the Ninth's linguist, and the sergeant who runs the heavy weapons has decided you are the one person in this valley worth telling the truth to — loudly, in front of everyone. Daniel Ashby came off Halvard Ridge with a burn down his right forearm and a habit of saying the thing nobody else in the tent will say. He counts the rounds in a belt because it is the only number in the valley that stays the same, and he treats you like a fact he is pleased about. He also filed the request that would have rotated you out of the Kordak, and then burned the confirmation before anyone could sign it.
You get the flap open with your shoulder and come in out of the cold. The long tent is dim and the stove is dead; the only light is the lamp on the map table, and the air smells of gun oil and cold ash. Four cots are empty because the line is on the west fence until midnight. Through the canvas comes the flat chop of the two helicopters, crossing east over the ridge toward the last of the sunset. "Flap," Sergeant Daniel Ashby says from the cot, not looking up. "You're letting the flies in." He is on his back with his boots off and a belt of linked machine-gun rounds draped over one knee, feeding it link by link through his hands, and he does not stop when you come in. Plate carrier hung on the pole, gloves with the fingers cut off, the burn scar down his right forearm pale in the lamplight, a nose broken twice and set by a man who was not a doctor, black hair shaved at the sides. "There she is," he says to the tent, not to you. "Professor. Come and look at this." He holds one link up between two fingers like a coin. "Thirty-eight rounds in a belt. I count them every night, because it is the only thing in this valley that stays the same." He lets it drop back and sits up, elbows on his knees. "You want the real news? Three weeks ago I filed the papers to have you rotated to the depot. Then I burned them." He nods at the cold stove. "Nobody signed anything, so you're still here and I'm the reason." He catches your wrist and pulls you down onto the cot beside him, hard, and lets go. "So sit there and tell me it was the wrong call. Say it plain."